10 More Things I Learned From Barefoot Ted

This is a follow-up to the post, 10 Things I Learned from Bare­foot Ted, that I wrote after tak­ing his first Advanced Bare­foot Run­ning class. This post cov­ers what I learned from assist­ing him in Begin­ner Bare­foot Run­ning classes.

I recently had the plea­sure of assist­ing Bare­foot Ted put on two run­ning clin­ics at Zom­bieRun­ner in Palo Alto, CA. There were about 20 par­tic­i­pants over the two four-hour classes. Their abil­i­ties ranged as did their prior run­ning and bare­foot run­ning expe­ri­ence. Some folks had taken POSE Tech­nique classes and had been run­ning up to a few miles bare­foot. Oth­ers had never even tried bare­foot run­ning before. Bare­foot Ted’s ener­getic, patient, and pos­i­tive man­ner helped put every­one at ease.

The events came at the right time for me. Work had been get­ting stress­ful and the hours long. Simul­ta­ne­ously, my run­ning mileage had dropped. More work and less run­ning is a great recipe to feel crappy. Really crappy. I had come down with a nasty cold a cou­ple of days ear­lier. Hang­ing out with Bare­foot Ted and all the very nice par­tic­i­pants for the day helped lift my mood and kick my ill­ness to the curb for good.

The begin­ner classes con­sisted of some walk­ing on con­crete, run­ning on asphalt, sprints on grass, jump­ing up and down con­crete stairs, and a lot of story-telling and teach­ing from Bare­foot Ted.

“Our feet are some of the most incred­i­ble vehi­cles on earth. Indeed, they have taken us to all ends of the world.” – Bare­foot Ted

1. Walk like a mon­key, not a robot.

Walk on a con­crete side­walk or other hard sur­face and land with your heels first. Pay atten­tion to how you fee land­ing that way, and also pay atten­tion to how it sounds in your head. Then change your form to land on your fore­foot first – just a lit­tle tap of the front part of your foot before your heel lands. Notice the dif­fer­ence? When I tried it I cer­tainly could feel and hear a dif­fer­ence. Bare­foot Ted points out that, while bystanders would not likely to be able to notice the dif­fer­ence in our form, we can expe­ri­ence the dif­fer­ence. He calls the heel-first style as robotic and clunky and talks of a fore­foot style as smooth and soft like a monkey.

2. Run relaxed, yet engaged.

Imag­ine that you’re on a nar­row beam. To suc­cess­fully run across it you must be engaged – not pay­ing atten­tion will surely result in a mis­step and falling off of it. You also have to be relaxed, though. If you’re mus­cles are too tense you will be rigid and your bal­ance will be lost. Run­ning bare­foot helps you be more engaged – feel­ing the ground below your feet, but it’s easy for new bare­foot run­ners to be tense. Remem­ber to relax all of your body, from your neck down to your toes. You’ll notice it will feel eas­ier to run.

3. Don’t plod!

A key point Bare­foot Ted wanted every­one to take away was that we can all tap into an intu­itive sense of how to run. One key aspect he wanted folks to focus on was a quick cadence – short­en­ing the time between left and right foot strikes to around 180 per minute. To demon­strate the dis­tinct dif­fer­ence between how peo­ple usu­ally run in shoes and how they do bare­foot, he used his arms. He char­ac­ter­ized reg­u­lar run­ning form as plod­ding, wav­ing his arms like a swim­mer, abruptly stop­ping at hor­i­zon­tal. He then con­trasted this motion with shorter, faster move­ments of his hands to show the right cadence and shorter stride. The vast major­ity of run­ners who past the group that day were plod­ders with one notice­able  excep­tion – a track coach run­ning in Vivo Barefoot’s new EVO shoes.

4. Feet are our first line of defense.

It’s much bet­ter to get an injury on a foot than blow out a knee. Feet are designed to be a barom­e­ter, to tell us how well we’re run­ning. If we injure a foot we can fix it before we suf­fer a larger injury to another part of our body that’s harder to heal. Of course, if we cover our feet up with thick shoes, we’re cut­ting off – or at least dras­ti­cally reduc­ing – the use of many mus­cles in our feet. In this case, instead of a foot hurt­ing we’ll likely not feel any­thing until, BAM, we blow a knee out. It’s as if the body knows that a foot injury is a lot eas­ier to heel from than a knee, hip, or back injury.

5. A numb foot is a dumb foot.

It doesn’t make sense to run with a foot that’s too cold. After all, one of the main rea­sons for run­ning with­out shoes is to increase pro­pri­o­cep­tion – the abil­ity to feel the ground. If you’re foot is numb from the cold, it can’t feel, negat­ing that ben­e­fit of going shod­less. For the same rea­son, con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, we don’t get big, thick cal­luses on our feet when we run bare­foot. That would be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive, as it would decrease our abil­ity to feel the ground. It wouldn’t make any sense to have thou­sands of nerve end­ings in our feet only to have them cov­ered up by hard calluses.

Bare­foot Ted showed par­tic­i­pants the bot­tom of his feet and how they are like sup­ple, worn leather. Tough, to with­stand a vari­ety of sur­faces, yet flex­i­ble and sens­ing, to react to those sur­faces. It makes sense to have many lay­ers of thin, flex­i­ble skin rather than a hard sur­face under our feet. The monks of Japan who run 50 miles at a time usu­ally only wear 3 oz san­dals made of rice straw. And many porters in the Himalayas walk bare­foot as it’s much eas­ier to sense how strong a foothold is before you place all of your weight on it.

6. Run at “persistence-hunt” trot.

A num­ber of indige­nous cul­tures, most notably the Kudu peo­ple in Africa, hunt ani­mals by run­ning after them until the ani­mals lit­er­ally drop dead from exhaus­tion. This is called per­sis­tence hunt­ing (because you’ve got to be damn per­sis­tent!). It will usu­ally take at least a few hours for the ani­mal to tire, so it’s impor­tant that the hunters con­serve their energy. One way they do this is to run at about 70% capacity.

When you run, prac­tice doing so at a slower pace. You should be able to breathe com­fort­ably only using your nose and still get all the oxy­gen you need. If you feel like you’re suf­fo­cat­ing, you’re prob­a­bly push­ing your­self too hard (or suf­fer­ing from aller­gies or a cold). The Apache Indi­ans of North Amer­ica used to make their boys prove that they were men by run­ning all day with water and a rock in their mouth. At the end of the day the boys had to be able to spit the water and rock out, prov­ing that they only breathed through their noses. It was believed that you were a man when you could run all day and never deplete your energy. It will likely take some time for us to be able to pull this off, so expect to walk a decent amount of time to begin with.

7. Increase your cadence and save energy.

The body nat­u­rally stores energy dur­ing run­ning, on the upswings. How­ever, this energy dis­si­pates quickly. It’s yet another rea­son we should keep a quick cadence. Less time spent between each foot strike trans­lates into less wasted energy. This effi­ciency will trans­late into a lot of saved energy over a long run. Another way to waste energy as well as for­ward momen­tum is to land on your heel, out in front of your cen­ter of grav­ity. You leg acts as a break, espe­cially when you land on a straight leg. Shorten your stride to apply the stored energy before it dis­si­pates and keep your knees bent, land­ing on your fore­foot under your cen­ter of gravity.

8. Use your arms to help with cadence.

Bare­foot Ted used to train in the moun­tains north of Los Ange­les with a Mex­i­can run­ning group. His trainer taught him to use his arms prop­erly by mak­ing him run while hold­ing a bam­boo stick in each hand. This ensured that Bare­foot Ted kept his arms mov­ing for­wards and back­wards and not side to side. The weight of the bam­boo sticks also teaches run­ners to keep their elbows bent and close to their body. If they don’t, the cen­trifu­gal force would be more pro­nounced and throw the runner’s bal­ance off. I’m going to give it a try with PB pipes at my cross­fit class.

9. Grass is a mys­tery material.

Bare­foot Ted explained why run­ning on grass can be more dan­ger­ous than run­ning on almost any other sur­face, includ­ing con­crete. The rea­son run­ning on grass can be so risky is that you don’t know what’s lurk­ing in. There could be all sorts of sharp mate­ri­als, and the sur­face is often uneven. On dirt, asphalt, or con­crete you can eas­ily see and avoid poten­tial prob­lem areas. He humor­ously referred to asphalt as being an answer to our ances­tors’ prayers – it’s so smooth and con­sis­tent com­pared to what nature usu­ally serves up!

10. Bare­foot, min­i­mal run­ning used to be the norm.

Bare­foot run­ning is not new to say the least, even in mod­ern times. Herb Elliot, the famed Aus­tralian run­ner from the 1950s and 60s, graced the cover of Sports Illus­trated two times, both bare­foot. Even when he wore run­ning shoes they were very min­i­mal – noth­ing like what run­ners are sold today. In fact, it was quite com­mon for track teams to run bare­foot and in very min­i­mal shoes at that time.

Bare­foot Ted shared the exam­ple Chris McDougall used to explain why bring­ing out more and more tech­nol­ogy in shoes is the wrong approach. It’s as if, he shares, we took some­one who doesn’t know how to swim very well and threw them into the deep end. As they begin to flail around, start throw­ing them more and more col­or­ful, fash­ion­able, tech­ni­cal flota­tion devices. While we might save them from drown­ing, they cer­tainly won’t be swim­ming any better!

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